Sales tax makes sense to cover roads because a lot of the wear and tear on the roads is caused by the trucks that deliver goods. Even if you bike to the store, you are using the roads in that way.

There is the old adage “Nobody got fired for going with Microsoft”, and it is real.

If you, as an IT guy recommend Linux, and some exec has a problem with his laptop (which they would have had no matter what OS is running on it) it WILL be your fault because you changed something.

Reading this made me think about how people have devices like this all over their lives.

I would love for a consumer group like the EFF or IEEE or whatever to “certify” devices from a security standpoint. It could start as a marketing point from the manufacturers standpoint, a logo they could add that says someone looked at it.

The cost they charge for buying a new car and the cost they pay for the parts of that car are very different things.

They will charge $50k with or without AM radio and would rather do it without.

It doesn’t HAVE to be but it makes it easy to have a schedule that only runs in certain days and it allows me to turn it on from the other room.

Yes, a coffee maker that connects to the internet does exist, usually for more than I spent on everything involved, and also usually with its own headaches.

I find that usually those devices all want their OWN app installed, so instead of just your home assistant, you have HA, and the Mr Coffee app, and the GE app, and whatever else, each with their own requests for telemetry and whatnot.

Building your own out of simple devices gives you more control and an easier vector to secure.

I have a few “smart” plugs. I generally don’t use the app to turn them off or on, but being able to schedule them is what I think makes them valuable.

I bought the cheapest coffeemaker I could find that has a physical switch and plugged it into a smart switch so that it turns on every morning, Monday through Friday, at a specific time. On the weekends I do use the app because I can start the coffee brewing while I am still in bed and it will be ready when I get downstairs.

Could all of this be done without an IoT device? Yes, in college I had one of those old school mechanical timer switches to do the same thing. It is just that now I get more control over how it works.

The point of these isn’t just to “use an app” to do things you could easily do yourself, but to get additional functionality from an app that simply pushing a button couldn’t do.

So the next solution is to let it connect to your network but then block it at the firewall. That way you have full control over what it sees.

It is a dumb arms race between consumers and the devices they purchased

I found this comment on what happened by dani-garcia, one of the main devs:

The short version is that around 8-ish years ago, Bitwarden changed the way the vault items were structured, and Vaultwarden added some backwards compatibility fields to ensure both old and new versions of the clients worked.

These backwards compatibility fields were supposed to be a temporary measure, but for at least the next three years the clients still required them, until we eventually forgot to keep track of them. At some point between 2021 and today, the clients stopped requiring these backwards compatibility fields, but Vaultwarden was still sending them.

This wasn’t a problem until Bitwarden decided to use the backwards compatibility fields in a completely different way, which caused the clients to crash.

Found here: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/discussions/7473

Would this make them useful to side load your own firmware to them? This “exploit” could make these into a hobbyist’s dream

I think I am using the wolf launcher? I can’t check right now, but I set it up a long time ago and then forgot about it.

I haven’t had any problems with it, I have both a tube and a shield pro and the white circle button works great on both.

There might also be a button remapper that you can get if you want the Netflix button to be a mute or something.

I have a ShieldTV plugged into mine and it has been great. You can install a new Launcher to have full control of what you see and it works great. I pretty much just use it for Jellyfin and YouTube now, but in the past have had all of the streaming services at one time or another.

I like these posts, I feel like there are many levels to any self hosted setup and getting an idea of what everyone is doing is fun.

My 2012 Toyota has an ‘app’ that I maybe tried once over ten years ago but haven’t used since. This is nothing new. It is called “Toyota Entune”

I mean, that has been Microsoft’s MO for their entire existence. With the exception of maybe some versions of Visual Studio, everything they have done was see what they can copy off their competitors.

This is interesting but I don’t know what computesdk is. Can anyone give context on what each instance was doing?

The good ‘ol’ hamster dance sped up version of that song from Robin Hood.

I love how happy the babies look.

Is it time for Vaultwarden to have its own clients?

I remember this happening to Linksys with the WRT-54g routers. They shipped with firmware based on open software (I don’t remember the exact license) and they were brought to court and forced to release the source code.

In the end it really helped the sales of that model because hobbyists wanted it for the freedom of running their own code on it.